
<p>BotScout is a service that helps fight automated web scripts, also known as "bots". Bots mindlessly roam the web looking for forms to fill out and submit in order to spread their spam, drop links, and also to gain admittance to a site so they can find and exploit additional forms. The result of all of this includes bogus registrations on forums, pollution of your carefully-developed database(s), offensive link spam, and numerous other problems. </p>

<p>Using BotScout you can reduce the amount of time you spend cleaning up after bots- in some cases it completely stops the bots dead!</p>

<p>Botscout tracks the names, IPs, and email addresses that bots use and then log them for future comparison. They also provide an simple API that you can use to test forms when they're submitted on your site. Doing a simple check against their database can reduce the number of bots getting through by 99%, and as mentioned above, in some cases it stops them <i>completely</i>.</p>

<p>Their database contains bot &#39;signatures&#39;. A signature is composed of a unique combination of the <b>name</b> the bot used when trying to register, the bot&#39;s <b>email address</b>, and the bot&#39;s <b>IP address</b>. These three items are used separately to identify bots whenever they use an already-seen name, email, or IP address. Some other bot directories claim to have hundreds of thousands of bot listings, but examination shows that much of their data are duplicated records. In contrast, the BotScout database is scrubbed regularly to help make sure that it contains only unique signatures.</p>
